Jobs’ legacy: Best CEO ever?

By Casey Newton, San Francisco Chronicle :
October 6, 2011

Since the day in 1977 that he introduced the Apple II, the world looked to Steve Jobs for leadership on computing, technology and design.

On Thursday, admirers and competitors alike awoke to a sobering new reality: a world where the oft-asked question “What would Steve do?” was giving gave way to the wistful “What would Steve have done?”

Jobs’ death this week at age 56 leaves a void unlikely to be filled by one person, historians and analysts said. The Apple co-founder’s ability to envision new markets and seemingly will them into existence was without peer.

“I don’t think in the history of the computing business, possibly in American business, there has been someone who was a tastemaker, an evangelist, and a technologist, all at the same level,” said Chris Garcia, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

It is not for lack of trying. Any number of forward-thinking technologists are waiting in the wings:

Jeff Bezos continues to grow Amazon in both sales and ambition, recently unveiling a tablet computer widely expected to become the iPad’s first credible challenger for market share.

Mark Zuckerberg quickly is transforming Facebook into the Internet’s central hub for connecting people and sharing content, and recently has shown off both improved presentation skills and a stronger focus on product design.

Jack Dorsey took on the Jobsian challenge of running two companies at once: Where Jobs had Apple and Pixar, Dorsey has top roles at Twitter and mobile-payments start-up Square, both of which have grown rapidly while retaining a sharp focus on product design.

Then there are the deputies Jobs leave behind at Apple, from CEO Tim Cook to design chief Jony Ive. With a Jobs-approved product road map that stretches through 2015, analysts say, Apple’s days as a tastemaker need not necessarily be behind it. In Jobs’ last years at the company, he reportedly instituted an executive training program, known as Apple University, designed to instill his values and product sense into every corner of the company. With Jobs now gone, his successors’ moves will be watched with even greater scrutiny.

Yet even among those running the largest technology companies in the world, no other CEO has managed to capture the public imagination like Jobs did. The global reaction to his death, as measured by the memorials found at Apple stores around the world on Thursday, has drawn comparisons to the outpouring of grief that followed the death of Princess Diana.

To view him as a mere technology figure likely undervalues his contributions to the world, said Steve Blank, an entrepreneur and Silicon Valley historian.

“Jobs transcended Silicon Valley in the last five years,” said Blank, a lecturer as UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “He became the standard by which every CEO in the 21st century will be measured. Forget who’s better in Silicon Valley — who was a better corporate CEO at any other company on the planet?”

Blank pointed to Apple’s stock price — which increased by more than 400 percent in the past five years — and Jobs’ model of continuous revolution inside the company, where new products like the iPhone and iPad were launched even though they ate into sales of iPods and laptop computers.

“There are billions of people who don’t even know where Silicon Valley is who know Steve Jobs’ name,” Blank said. “Ninety percent of the people who are feeling bad right now can’t even find Cupertino (Calif.) on a map. Yet his company’s market cap is the biggest in the world. What other conversation do we need to have?”

And yet while Jobs’ loss will be felt around the world, on Thursday it was being felt most acutely at home.

“For Silicon Valley, he has, in many ways, been the star around which we all orbit,” wrote Jonathan Schwartz, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, in a tribute to Jobs posted on his blog. “His absence is disorienting. I can’t think of a better way of describing it.”